Christian J. Feldbacher-Escamilla (DCLPS)
Two peers have an epistemic disagreement regarding a proposition, if their epistemic attitudes towards the proposition differ. The question of how to deal with such a disagreement is the problem of epistemic peer disagreement. Several proposals to resolve this problem have been put forward in the literature. Most of them mainly concentrate on the question of if, and if so, to what extent one should incorporate evidence of such a disagreement in forming an epistemic attitude towards a proposition. Classical is the so-called "equal weight view" which suggests to generally incorporate such evidence by equally weighting. At the other end of the spectrum is the so-called "steadfast view" which suggests to generally not incorporate such evidence. In between are views that suggest incorporating such evidence from case to case differently as, e.g., the total evidence view.
In this paper we want to present a new argument in favour of the equal weight view. A common argument for this view stems from a principle one might want to call the "principle of epistemic indifference": If the epistemic attitudes of n individuals are, regarding their rational formation, epistemically indistinguishable (i.e. the individuals are epistemic peers), then each attitude should be assigned a weight of 1/n. However, as we will show, the equal weight view results from a more general approach of forming epistemic attitudes towards propositions in an optimal way. By this the argument for equal weighting can be massively strengthened from reasoning via indifference to reasoning from optimality.
